Are schools losing their heads?

6th October 2023 by Timo Hannay [link]

Update 6th October 2023: See also this coverage in Schools Week.

Yesterday was World Teachers' Day, but these are tough times for those in the profession, not least school leaders. As we reported in June, teacher vacancies have been at historic highs since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and the last academic year, 2022/23, also saw unusually elevated levels of headteacher turnover. An important question is how much of this was simply due to an 'unwinding' of pandemic-era constraints, with teachers who had intended to switch schools or careers in 2020 or 2021 now belatedly able to make good on their plans, and how much reflects a sustained 'new normal' of rising teacher shortages and falling tenure.

It's now two-and-half years since the last nationwide lockdown in England, and September is high season for new headteacher appointments, so this brief post looks at the latest trends to examine whether we have now returned to something more like pre-pandemic norms. The short answer: not yet.

Heads up

Figure 1 shows the number of new headteacher appointments each month over the last four academic years (green, blue, red and purple lines) and so far in 2023/24 (black line). Predictably, many more new appointments are made in September than in other months, with more modest termly peaks in January and April. The last pre-pandemic September was in 2019, after which numbers dropped dramatically in September 2020 (in between the early-2020 and early-2021 national lockdowns) before recovering somewhat in September 2021 and then overshooting hugely in September 2022. If we look at all years together again, we can see that September 2023 (black line) is lower than the massive 2022 peak, but still higher than pre-pandemic levels.

It is important to note that new headteacher appointments can reflect a wide variety of situations. We track data from the Department for Education that record the name of the headteacher at each school. Changes are often the result of simple replacements of one permanent head with another, but sometimes they reflect shorter-term arrangements such as maternity cover, or more complex reorganisations, such as the addition of a new joint head. All such situations are included here: we filter out only trivial changes, such as spelling corrections and new surnames, that do not appear to reflect a change in personnel.

Looking at all years together, it is also useful to plot cumulative data, which makes aggregate annual differences easier to see. Typically, around 40% of headteacher appointments for any given year are made in September, though this dropped to about 30% during the pandemic (ie, new headteacher appointments not only fell but also became less seasonal) before rising to 45% last year. September 2023 was about 14% higher than September 2019. This increase is broadly in line with the elevated levels of secondary school teacher vacancies that we continue to see. It equates to just over 200 extra headteachers appointed last month relative to a normal pre-pandemic September. It will be interesting to see how these trends continue during the rest of the 2023/24 school year.

Note also that the picture varies by phase, with primary schools showing much bigger increases over pre-pandemic baseline than secondary schools

(Use the menus above Figure 1 to view monthly or cumulative data, and to select different types of school. Click on the figure legend to hide or view individual academic years. Hover over the lines to see corresponding data values.)

Tenure track

Is this higher headteacher turnover a consequence of longstanding incumbents bringing forward their career moves or retirements, or is it due to newer appointees being more likely to leave their positions quickly? Perhaps it's a bit of both. This is a complex question to answer fully and we won't be able to do it justice here, but there are some signs in the data of an increase in headteachers with very short tenures – or at least, changes in school leadership occurring in quick succession. The proportion of headteacher changes at primary schools that occur within 2-12 months of a previous change has been very consistent over the years at around 22%, but so far during calendar year 2023 it has risen to almost 26%. This is due mainly not to appointments made in September, but those made out of season earlier in the year. There is a similar trend among secondary schools, which have historically hovered at around 20%, but are now at nearly 25%. This is a potentially important issue that we plan to investigate more fully in future.

SchoolDash Insights subscribers can view the latest headteacher appointments data, which is updated weekly, in (surprise!) the Headteachers section. Non-subscribers can sign up for a free trial.

We welcome questions and comments – please write to us at [email protected]. And if you would like us to write to you when we have new analyses to share then please sign up for our free monthly-ish newsletter.